Post#585 » by lessthanjake » Wed Feb 19, 2025 12:50 am
To me, the “6 for 6” stuff never made much sense, because of course it is better to lose in the Finals than to lose before the Finals. I get that people pay more attention to the Finals, so losing in the Finals maybe ends up worse practically speaking because more people see you fail. But if we’re really having a retrospective discussion about it, it’s not worse to lose in the Finals than to lose before the Finals.
That said, I don’t think the argument for Jordan really relies on the “6 for 6” thing in any meaningful way.
At a very basic level, winning 6 titles is of course better than winning 4 titles, regardless of whether the guy with 6 had meaningful failures or not.
But even looking beyond that, I think we could expand how we think about this to talk about how often these players converted having a legit contending team into a title. By that measure, Jordan isn’t 6 for 6 anymore, but he still looks much better than LeBron IMO.
For instance, in the years the Bulls didn’t win the title, the only years that their pre-playoffs title odds were +1000 or better were in 1990 and 1995. Their odds were +800 and +500 respectively in those years. They were not the favorites either year, but in those two years they were amongst the top few favorites. I think those years can be considered failures from Jordan, because he had a contending team and did not come away with a title. The other years, his team was not a contending-level team and was not given much of any chance of winning the title, despite how good Jordan himself was. So that leaves Jordan as basically being 6 of 8 in terms of titles while on a contending team.
In contrast, we have a lot more years where LeBron had a contending team and didn’t win. Let’s do the same analysis for LeBron. How many non-title years did his team have pre-playoffs title odds of +1000 or better? Eight years! LeBron had non-title-winning years where his teams’ pre-playoffs title odds were +160, +160, +200, +225, +300, +400, +405, and +800! That’s *a lot* more times failing with a contending team. By this measure, LeBron is 4 of 12 with a contending team, while Jordan was 6 of 8.
Of course, one retort to this may be that title odds take into account how good the star is, so LeBron’s teams only had such good odds because of how good he was. That is true. But I think to believe that that created this difference in conversion rate between Michael Jordan and LeBron James, you’d have to believe that LeBron James was considered far better individually than Jordan was—which is not something that strikes me as being plausible. LeBron being on his teams wasn’t moving those odds way more than Jordan being on his teams did.
Another retort to this would be that LeBron had to face the dynasty Warriors. But the Warriors being incredible was baked into the odds in those years (i.e. LeBron’s Cavaliers had worse odds because everyone knew how good the Warriors were), and is relevant for less than half of those listed years anyways.
In any event, I think one can find various excuses for LeBron’s vastly worse conversion rate while being on a contender, but ultimately that conversion rate is part of the story of their greatness, even if you think there’s ways to explain why LeBron converted so much less. Greatness is about what happened. And part of what happened is that Jordan’s teams almost always won the title when they were a contender, and LeBron’s teams usually didn’t win the title when they were contenders.
OhayoKD wrote:Lebron contributes more to all the phases of play than Messi does. And he is of course a defensive anchor unlike messi.
LeBron is 0-7 in game winning/tying FGs in the finals. And is 20/116 or 17% in game winning/tying FGs in the 4th/OT for his career. That's historically bad 
The hero worshipping around MJ is second to none.
